This was the fulfillment of a dream and the beginning of a new era of preservation. That night, the lions roared, and Ken Beaton and I jumped over the moon.

(Mervyn Cowie – Kenya’s first director of National Parks, on birth of East Africa’s first National Park- Nairobi National Park 1946- 1950.)

Under this ruined headstone at the Entebbe European Cemetery lie the remains of Kenneth De Planta Beaton. The man whose pioneering efforts set up Uganda’s jewels, the Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Fall parks, is discarded and forgotten.

Ken Beaton (1905 – 1954): a naturist, a conservationist, to some a fantasist; a man born of Africa, with a heart for Uganda.

(Read obituary below)

I have learned pitifully little about Ken Beaton, despite the depth of his work and the reach of his legacy.

This is what I know:

He was born to Captain Duncan Beaton and Alice De Planta in Malawi. His mother was a missionary. His father was a colonial administrator and (according to the Rekero camp history page) “a well-known and familiar figure in the life of Kenya.”

The site further states:

Ken Beaton, Chief Game Warden (Kenya) and first Director of Uganda’s National Parks was a great man. His ideas on what a park should be and how it should be run were possibly more progressive than any in Africa at the time. The great thing about Beaton was that he was not hidebound by out-dated colonial attitudes to the Africans.

Licensed to Guide, a book by Susie Cazenove on the conservation efforts in Kenya, notes that

During the Second World War … Ken Beaton served in the King’s African Rifles fighting in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). He returned to Kenya with Italian prisoners of war and bullion by a circuitous route down the Omo River to avoid the shifta (Somali bandits) who invested the country. They were merciless. In fact at the final capitulation of Gonda, the town had to be surrounded by British troops in order to save the Italians from being slaughtered.

When the war ended, Ken, after many years spent working for Kenya Parks and Wildlife, was sent to Uganda as the first director of Uganda’s national parks. He was a great hero to Ron, who adored those visits to Uganda. His father’s brief from the governor was to set up two new designated parks, the Queen Elizabeth National Park and Murchison Fall National Park …

Before he came to Uganda, Beaton established himself in the park circuit in Kenya. He was the first park warden of Nairobi National Park, according to Edward I. Steinhart’s book “Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya.” Steinhart notes that Ken Beaton “seems to have been a man who shared with his director the somewhat romantic and aesthetic vision of wildlife preservation as well as the delight in wildlife observation of a modern naturalist.”

Jeff Schauer, who writes the blog California Mwananchi, in his post “Building a National Park: Uganda” writes of nBeaton’s contribution to the country’s national park history:

If Murchison Falls National Park (amongst the most popular in Uganda today) and other parks were to be open to the public, they had to have roads, offices, accommodation and boundaries.  The creation of the infrastructure that is today so central to the wildlife industry that dominates eastern Africa was no mean feat.

Sometimes the National Parks staff had help, as when an unwitting surveyor decided that the easiest route for the road was the exact route used for years by successive elephant herds.  At other times the wildlife was less accommodating.  Ken Beaton, the interim Director and Warden, decided that his 3’x3’ office was too small when a spitting cobra took up residence.

Kenneth Beaton published a compilation of his notes in one book, “A Warden’s Diary,” which is still available for purchase as a novelty item. I am of the opinion that it should have a place in all libraries in my beloved country which forgets to remember and remembers to forget.

A final word on Kenneth De Plant Beaton from the journal Fauna and Flora International published in 1955:

The tragic loss of Ken Beaton has marred a year of great progress in the parks: a year graced by the visit of Her Majesty the Queen to the Queen Elizabeth Park. The foundations laid by Ken Beaton and the honour of Her Majesty’s visit will stand us in good stead for many years to come and will be an inspiration for us to make our two parks second to none.

Alas, were this but true!

Here lies Arthur Delmar Combe: prolific mineralogist, volcanologist and petrologist.

You are excused if you have never heard of A. D.  After all, who was he but the man for whom the mineral ‘combeite’ was named? So what if the discovery combeite in 1957 has led to important medical developments in biocompatible bone restorations as well as numerous orthopedic and dental innovations?

The sinking, stinking Entebbe European Cemetery is the final resting place for this former Assistant Director at the Uganda Geological Survey who had  a heart for the ageless stories of stones. The beautiful black block of Ankole granite used to fashion his headstone was a loving tribute to his pioneering work in mapping the crater lakes of southwestern Uganda and his discovery of potash-rich deposits in Toro.

Now, like much of Uganda’s inglorious past, Arthur Delmar Combe lies forgotten … and we wake to a grey dawn.

I have discovered pitifully little about A. D. Combes. An excerpt in the journal Nature from July 16, 1949 sheds some light:

Mr. Arthur Delmar Combe. Born in Adelaide in 1893, Combe was educated in Sydney, to which city his family had moved during his early years. While yet a boy he developed the keen interest in mineralogy which determined his choice of profession.

By the sudden and unexpected death of A. D. Combe on May 23, at the age of fifty-five, African geology has lost one of its most striking and colorful personalities, and a career of brilliant achievement in Uganda and the adjoining territories has been unhappily cut short.

And from The Sidney Morning Herald:

The Australia Museum archives provide important information into Combe’s early work in mineralogy

The name of Arthur Combe first appears in the Museum Minerals register in 1919. Arthur had a passion for collecting minerals and was encouraged in this by G.W. Card, Curator of the Mining Museum …

Such was his enthusiasm, he worked as a miner in several mining fields such as South Blocks, Broken Hill, North Lyell on the west coast of Tasmania, Yerranderie in the Burragorang Valley (in fairly rugged country, although it was only 90 km in a straight line south-west of Sydney) and Mount Painter, South Australia.  All of these mines ceased working many years ago, so most of the minerals Combe collected would be unobtainable today except in collections. He was a most discerning and intrepid collector.

In the early 1920s he was appointed as a geologist on the staff of the Uganda Geological Survey. For nearly twenty years from the early 1930s until his death in 1949, on each occasion when he was on furlough from Uganda, he spent part of the time in Sydney with his father and sisters and always visited the mineral department of the Museum.

It was only a short trip from Uganda to mining areas in Zaire (then the Belgian Congo) such as Katanga where Combe made an outstanding collection of uranium minerals. He also collected from other areas in southern Africa …

… He told of a big lump of pitchblende, the chief ore of uranium and very radioactive, which weighed a few hundred weight and which was kept outside the mine office at Katanga. Male employees who had too many children used to go and sit on this monster specimen now and then in the hope of becoming sterile.

In southwestern Uganda A. D. opened the doors to detailed research on the petrology of the Rwenzori and Albertine basin, thus blazing the trail for the oil exploration today.

A regular research partner and coauthor of his, Arthur Holmes, wrote:

… my old friend and collaborator, the late Mr. A. D. Combe, began a systematic survey of the province which he completed only a few months before his lamented death in 1949. At intervals the specimens collected by him, amounting in all to well over a thousand, have been sent to me for petrological study.

A joint memoir, was penned by Arthur Holmes as a “lasting monument to Combe’s insight as a volcanologist,” but I have not been able to get a copy or abstract of it.  It provides a critical petrographic and chemical analysis of the region stretching from the Muhavura Mountain in Kisoro to the sands of Kaiso in Hoima.

Combe recorded his own findings on the case with another Uganda-based mineralogist, W. C. Simmons. In 1933 they wrote a detailed report on their studies in Kisoro that was published in the Uganda Geological Survey. Unfortunately the report ‘The volcanic area of Bufumbira. The geology and petrology of the volcanic area of Bufumbira, south-west Uganda’ is not freely available for my perusal.

However, in its place are documents, photos, maps, sketches and numerous diary entries from Combes on his research at Katunga, the Holocene volcanic mountain near Igara. His work on the local minerals Katungite and Ugandandite continue to inform geological and archeological study.

Additionally, he all but definitively found that there were no gold deposits in western Uganda – information that would have saved thousands of poor Ugandans valuable time and money in the late 1980s “gold rush.”

Ah, but why should you bother with a rock-obsessed random Australian?

No reason.

As long as Uganda doesn’t forget to remember. As long as the past  remains our present. As long as knowledge doesn’t die and learning doesn’t end.

Perhaps then Arthur Delmar Combe can rest.

Mourned at the graves in the European Cemetery in Entebbe. Saw the face of inevitability, not in my mortality, but again and again in the shameful decrepitude of my nation.

They are not my zombies, but they are. Not my past, but my wretchedness.

… When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

- William Shakespeare; from Sonnet LXIV

... so idllyic that a shallow, open public piss palace has been erected on it.

***

zom.bie  noun \ˈzäm-bē\

The defacing of the graves is a reminder that in my country, nothing lasts ...

... not even our zombies.

For the next scheduled hearing of the civil suit against the demolition of Uganda’s national museum:

***

Remember, remember

The 8th of November

2 p.m. at the High Court!

***

Here’s what you can do:

• Call your favorite radio station to keep the case on the public agenda
• Link to a live twitter feed on the case (I’m encouraging a court reporter to tweet the event)
• Join the Save the Uganda Museum Facebook page to lend your support. So far only 265 people ‘like’ the page!
• Ask your local government representatives or MP to join the petition
• Harangue the administrators at your child’s school to make frequent visits to the museum
• Visit the museum yourself, even if you have been there a hundred times before. It’s dirt cheap! Only 2k!
• Donate to organizations that filed the case to meet their legal costs. For instance, the Cross Cultural Foundation of Uganda (A/c 0108213220000 Standard Chartered Bank, Speke Road Branch, Kampala)
• Lend support to the beleaguered staff of the museum currently blogging at http://ugmuseums.blogspot.com/.

Here’s why we should keep fighting:

Did you know that as recently as 1985 the Uganda Museum was just one of several national museums in Uganda? There were two – not one, but TWO – natural history museums in Entebbe and Mweya. There was a museum in Soroti and a second in Kabale that was closed a few years ago. And, AND, there was a medical museum at Mulago.

Sit down my children. Grab a cup of delicious Ugandan robusta. Grab it and weep.

Quoting the 1981 findings of a UNESCO team on the state of the two natural history museums -

Both of these small museums are in an appalling, state of neglect; their collections have disintegrated beyond hope of repair through lack of care during the difficult years preceding the 1979 war.

No one appeared to be in charge at the Entebbe Natural History Museum when we visited it, and the collections appeared to have been completely destroyed by insects.

At Mweya, many specimens that had once been preserved in formaldehyde were in bottles half or three-quarters empty of liquid, and the exposed portions of the specimens were beginning to disintegrate at the top, I was told that many had already been discarded. The stuffed specimens were badly insect-eaten.

The Medical Museum at Makerere university. The Medical Museum is not a museum in the usual sense. It is a teaching facility for the Medical School at Makerere university. It does not come under the Department of Antiquities. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to say something about this most impressive institution. Professor R, Owor, Head of the Department of Pathology, and his staff, as well as Mr Serumaga and his staff at the Department of Medical Illustration which supplies most, if not all of the teaching material in the Museum, are fighting against terrible odds to maintain this indispensable aid to the teaching in the Department.

Crying yet? No?

This was the fate of Kabale Regional Museum as reported by Uganda Radio Network four years ago.

Kabale Regional Museum has lost key funding that would guarantee it a permanent new home.
Samuel Nkudiye, curator of Kabale Museum, says 100,000 dollars loaned to Uganda by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was intended for the construction of a facility to house the museum. The museum has been homeless since late last year when the building in which it was located was repossessed by its Asian owners.
The credit agreement was signed six years ago between the International Development Association and the Government of Uganda. The funds were also to be used for the establishment of a heritage trail in Fort Portal, development of a countrywide cultural historic sites register and database and training of staff of the Department of Antiquities and Museums in visitor management and museum operations.
The project was expected to be completed by June 30, 2007.
Samuel Nkudiye says the Commissioner of Antiquities informed him that the money was not claimed and so was not used for the purpose for which it was intended. He says the money was instead used to upgrade the Bwindi Forest project.

Remember, remember

The 8^th of November

2 p.m. at the High Court!

In Luganda. 3%.

Apparently the study of Luganda was compulsory for his class at Kings College Budo and Digory couldn’t be bothered. Why struggle to learn a third language when he hadn’t fully mastered the first two? His answers were hilarious and sad. He didn’t even try.

Digory isn’t the hero here, although I love him to bits. The real hero is his teacher who valiantly awarded him three measly marks for “effort.”

Effort.

You know what it is they say about the victory in just showing up. Or is it the humiliation of only showing up?

In September, Ugandan bi-weekly newspaper The Observer ran an ‘analysis’ of commercial traditional dance artistes. “Are Troupes Ruining Traditional Dances?” it asked.

The author of the article postulates that “commercial competition” among the growing number of dance troupes is somehow watering down culture. According to him, the beauty of tribal dances in Uganda is being ruined by new creations, new costumes and modern instruments. You can feel his indignation that electric drums are being used instead of the traditional wood and skin; and horror of horrors, Kinyarwanda arm movements have made their way into Kiganda dance!

Why should I care?

I shouldn’t really … but there is that 3% for Digory’s Luganda language paper that won’t leave my mind.

Effort.

To celebrate The Reverend’s birthday, my family and I went to watch the Sunday night dance performance at the Ndere Centre.  The food was expensive, the seats uncomfortable and my year-old niece was unhappy at the world, but this did nothing to dampen the mood.

The performances were electrifying. The costumes were dazzling. The combination of the brilliant full moon and the supernatural gyrations of the girl from Karamoja took my breath away. When the drummers from Burundi majestically marched their way on and off stage, it took everything within me not to shout “Marry Me!” and really mean it to any of the sweaty dozen who would have me.

Effort.

Not a word you can respectfully use to describe Stephen Rwangyezi and the Ndere Troupe. He almost single-handedly revived the appreciation of traditional dance in Uganda and has done a remarkable job in building the Ndere Centre and promoting the diversity of Uganda’s tribal culture around the world.

However, by some people’s standards, he is falling short. Way short.

Damn him for attempting to design creative costumes for the dancers. In the old days all ladies danced bare breasted! Damn him for encouraging new choreography, the old foot stamping was grand enough! How dare he use bwola footwork in dingding? What right has he to use the agwara from the Alur in a dance celebrating the coronation of a Bunyoro king?

Effort.

There are far inferior dance troupes around the country. The kind of lip synching whatnots condemned in said article. However before we poo-poo them for showing up, at least they have. No matter how ‘diluted’ their content, at least they are keeping the art and conversation about it alive.

One last thought.

It used to be that the measure of opulence at a wedding ceremony in Kampala was that you had a public address system and a DJ to blare the latest hits from the English-speaking west. Now, you have arrived, if at your wedding you have a traditional dance troupe. Any traditional dance troupe.

3% oyee!  My new SI unit for success.

Time to move on to Greater Things.

Or not. Or Paradise Lost.

Adam inquires concerning celestial motions, is doubtfully answered, and exhorted to search rather things more worthy of knowledge.

Greater things like the “Magnetohydrodynaic Instabilities in Accretion Discs in Close Binary Systems: Study of the Anomalous Low State of the X-ray Binary Hercules X-1.”

Which is my way of saying that tonight was a great night to live in Uganda.

Due to the combined wonder of a five-hour blackout, a stubborn foul smell under my fridge, the gift of a Manu Dibango album and the marvelous Google Sky Map app I was forced to seek the solace of the stars. A beautiful exile it was.

For three hours I was treated to the spectacle of the Orionid meteor shower. A breathtaking celestial echo that resonates with my soul.

Resonates, Or so I wish.

Alas, I am no Milton. The dismal education I received at the hands of the Ugandan school system means poetry was taught as a non-essential and astronomy was for dreamers and fairies. A system that faithfully churns out unimaginative, shallow, unthinking, bland Ugandans.

Thankfully,

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Seriously though, does anyone else think it’s incomprehensible that 49 years after independence Uganda’s government is 60 years away from considering an observer status in the space race and treats Galileo Galilei like a mythical beast?

But, there is hope. Really.

“Magnetohydrodynamic Instabilities in Accretion Discs in Close Binary Systems: Study of the Anomalous Low State of the X-ray Binary Hercules X-1.”

Or –

Instabilities in the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids in diffuse materials around two stars closely orbiting around their common center of mass: Study of the irregular low state of the moderately strong source Hercules X-1.

Or –

Thank God for Simon Anguma, Edward Jurua (author of the grossly misinterpreted paper quoted above) and the physics team at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology.

Simon Anguma: fighting fearlessly, tirelessly to introduce the serious study of astro physics in Uganda’s universities and high schools. Battling the naysayers, educating the ignorant, debating the dumb.

Simon Anguma: Uganda’s very own Buzz Lightyear.

Say it with me people – To infinity … and beyond!

He and Jurua (one of the most intelligent people I don’t yet know) have a tough job ahead. These are the facts about Uganda and space study:

-          ZERO astronomical facilities

-          ZERO government astronomy and science public outreach programs

-          ZERO (well, almost) media coverage of astronomical matters

Eish.

Quoting Buzz Anguma, there is a misunderstanding of astronomy in Uganda. An urgent need for the government to understand that it doesn’t only involve “celestial bodies … but remote sensing, geodesy, satellite communication, satellite meteorology and global climate studies.”

In other words –

It sounds fanciful, impractical and doesn’t really line up with Uncle Joel’s 10-point plan, but shouldn’t we demand more of ourselves?

Grab a chair during tomorrow’s blackout and watch the climax of the Orionid meteor shower. Then tell me why, Uganda, we can’t do more (just a little more) to add to the understanding of this beautiful, wonderful universe in which we live.

C’mon Uganda, we can do it. Say it with me:

.

In honor of the most hilarious act of civil disobedience I have heard of in years, I present my favorite bee-inspired movies. Hopefully … HOPEFULLY … they will lead to an amazing Ugandan spin-off.

A definite read.

Dear Lord, forgive my askance, but I am drowning in despair.